Emeritus Professor Ian Hunter

BA (La Trobe), DipEd (La Trobe), PhD (Griffith), FAHA.

Ian Hunter was an Australian Professorial Fellow whose research has two main foci. Since the mid 1990s he has been working on the history of early modern political, religious and philosophical thought, focusing on the academic culture of the Holy Roman German Empire. During this time his publications have included Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (2001); Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty: Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Political Thought (2002) (co-edited with David Saunders); Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2005) (co-edited with John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman); and The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity (2006) (co-edited with Conal Condren and Stephen Gaukroger). In collaboration with Thomas Ahnert and Frank Grunert, he has recently completed the first English translation of works by the early enlightenment political jurist Christian Thomasius. His most recent book is The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (2007). Since 2004 Professor Hunter has been developing a second research area, on the ‘history of theory’, whose aim is to provide an intellectual history of the 1960s ‘theory boom’. A pilot study, ‘The History of Theory’, appeared in CriticalInquiry in 2006.

On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality, and Obscenity Law (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's, 1993), co-authored with David Saunders and Dugald Williamson).

Accounting for the Humanities: The Language of Culture and the Logic of Government (Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, 1991), co-authored with Denise Meredyth, Bruce Smith and Geoff Stokes.

The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), co-edited with Conal Condren and Stephen Gaukroger.

Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Ashgate, 2005), co-edited with John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman.

Samuel Pufendorf: The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, together with two discourses and a commentary by Jean Barbeyrac, edited, with an Introduction, notes and translations, by Ian Hunter and David Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).

Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty: Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Political Thought (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Press, 2002), co-edited with David Saunders.

Recent articles and book chapters

"Secularization: The Birth of a Modern Combat Concept," Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming).

"The Uses of Natural Law in Early Modern Germany: Christian Thomasius’s Reshaping of the Legal Persona," in Christian Callisen (ed), Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle (London: Ashgate, forthcoming).

"The Law of Nature and Nations," in Aaron Garrett (ed), The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2014), 559-92.

"The Figure of Man and the Territorialisation of Justice in ‘Enlightenment’ Natural Law: Pufendorf and Vattel," Intellectual History Review, 23 (3), 2013.

"The Tolerationist Programs of Thomasius and Locke," in Jon Parkin and Timothy Stanton (eds), Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 107-37.

"‘A Jus Gentium for America’: The Rules of War and the Rule of Law in the Revolutionary United States," Journal of the History of International Law 14, 2012, pp. 173-206.

"Vattel in Revolutionary America: From the Rules of War to the Rule of Law," in Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (eds), Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (London: Routledge, in 2012), pp. 12-22.

"Theory Time: On the History of Poststructuralism," in Ian Donaldson and Mark Finnane (eds), Taking Stock: The Humanities in Australian Life Since 1968 (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2012), pp. 75-111.

"Kant’s Regional Cosmopolitanism," Journal of the History of International Law 12, 2010, pp. 165-88.

"Global Justice and Regional Metaphysics: On the Critical History of the Law of Nature and Nations," in Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter (eds), Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire, (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010), pp. 11-29.

"After Representation: Recent Discussions of the Relation between Language and Literature," in David Oswell (ed), Cultural Theory, London: Sage, 2010. (Republication of the 1984 article).

"The Man and the Citizen: The Pluralisation of Civil Personae in Early Modern German Natural Law," in Anna Yeatman and Magdalena Zolkos (eds), Security, State and Subject Formation (New York: Continuum Books, 2010), pp. 16-35.

"Sacrilege and the Deconfessionalisation of Politics," in Elizabeth Coleman and Kevin White (eds), Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society (Canberra: ANU e Press, 2006), pp. 109-17.

"The University Philosopher in Early Modern Germany," in Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter (eds), The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 35-65.

"The State of History and the Empire of Metaphysics," History and Theory 44, 2005, pp. 289-303.

"The Passions of the Prince: Moral Philosophy and Staatskirchenrecht in Thomasius’s Conception of Sovereignty," Cultural and Social History 2, 2005, pp. 113-29.

"Thomasius on the Toleration of Heresy," in Ian Hunter, John Christian Laursen, and Cary J. Nederman (eds), Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 155-67.

"Bringing the State to England: Andrew Tooke’s Translation of Samuel Pufendorf’s De officio hominis et civis," History of Political Thought 24, 2003, pp. 218-34, co-authored with David Saunders.

"The Love of a Sage or the Command of a Superior: The Natural Law Doctrines of Leibniz and Pufendorf," in T. J. Hochstrasser and Peter Schröder (eds), Early Modern Natural Law Theories: Contexts and Strategies (Berlin: Kluwer, 2003), pp. 169-93.